


after the flood, all the colors came out

by madamebadger



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/F, Friends to Lovers, Post-Canon, Rannoch, handwaving the me3 ending for fun and profit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-17
Updated: 2015-10-17
Packaged: 2018-04-26 20:55:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5020210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madamebadger/pseuds/madamebadger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tali has nursed a crush on Shepard for years, but there was never any indication--any at all--that anything could come of it. And she has plenty on he plate with the rebuilding of Rannoch. But the truth is that the heart is not so easy to quiet.</p><p>Especially when Shepard comes back to visit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	after the flood, all the colors came out

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anxiousAnarchist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anxiousAnarchist/gifts).



> This assumes some extremely handwavy ending to ME3 such that the Reapers are gone, Shepard is alive, and so are the geth (and EDI, although she does not appear in this fic).

Rebuilding Rannoch is the hardest thing Tali has ever done. 

And that is no small thing. Tali has lived through Noveria and Ilos, the Alarei and the Collector Base, Thessia and London. But those were, at least, clear missions: with a goal, an endpoint. She might have died there—but she didn't. And she knew what to do.

(What to do: _follow Shepard_. She has never gone wrong with that as her directive.)

But Rannoch is something else. There is no endpoint. Even the barest beginning of the work, rebuilding the cities and establishing agriculture and restoring the infrastructure, would not be done in her lifetime. If they were lucky, her children's generation would see them, if not done, then at least restored to stability. More likely it would be her great-grandchildren who would bring the seeds they were planting to fruition.

Still. Yet. It is the hardest work she's ever done, and yet it is a kind of miracle, to be _doing_ the work. To have the chance.

Every six-day she takes a lightflyer out of the makeshift settlement that the Admiralty Board has made its headquarters, out to the cliffs where Shepard fought the Reaper, the cliffs where she planned to build a house. There is no house there yet, of course. The people still live in close quarters, in prefab buildings hastily put up—prefab buildings, and quarters in grounded Fleet ships. Even with the geth helping, every bit of material and labor must go towards things that will help their society as a whole, not frivolities like a house for herself.

(But she will have a house, someday. It was her father's promise to her, that she has turned into her promise to his memory.)

On those days, she sits on the edge of the cliff and looks out over the river. It is astonishing, how quickly the world had begun to reclaim the dead Reaper. Its exoskeleton would take centuries to wear away, strange bio-ceramic compound that it is, but even so the heavy spring rains dragged its long legs askew, and there are already signs of corrosion in some of its joints, designed as they were for deep space and not the oxygen-rich atmosphere of Rannoch. Vines creeped up over it, mosses colonized its rough exterior, and fish fed and bred in the eddies and pools beneath its sprawling legs. Birds and beasts nested in the crevices and slopes of its massive carapace. Its intelligence snuffed, its drive core gone out, it is very nearly inert: nothing but a piece of the landscape, something for living Rannoch to take over, disassemble, subsume.

It pleases Tali, to watch, week by week, her world take apart the Reaper. It stands now, a monument and in some ways a pilgrimage site—but she hopes that she will see it wholly overrun by brambles, swarmed by birds, nothing but a slumped shape of green against the glitter of the river from the window of the house that she will one day have.

She thinks of that, on the days when she sits: the house that she will have, the Reaper as it is consumed piece by piece by the world. Her people, whose lives still hang like a heavy chain around her neck: an honor and a burden. Her father, who so deeply desired this day. Her mother, who would have sat next to her in the afternoon light, watching the birds fish in the river, and laughed her beautiful laugh, that Tali clings to in memory.

She also thinks of Shepard.

* * *

Tali has been in love with Shepard for years. She doesn't think that this is much of a secret, except possibly to Shepard herself. (Certainly Garrus knows, because he teases her mercilessly about it; but these days his teasing is kind.) But—how could she not have been? 

She remembers being a girl, not even an adult yet, on her Pilgrimage. She knew before she left the Fleet that non-quarians would disdain her, but she had never been among non-quarians before. Even knowing, it was still a shock, to discover that they would almost to a one look at her with a sneer—or look straight through her, make her a non-entity in their eyes, a nothing. Oh, there were some who were more courteous than that (she will never forget Doctor Michel's kindness, for all that these days she invokes her name mostly to tease Garrus back), but it was so strange, to go from being the Migrant Fleet's precocious genius child, the Admiral's daughter of whom much was expected, to being someone who people looked not at but _through_.

Shepard never looked through her. Shepard looked at her and saw her—saw her in a way that Tali had never expected to be seen, not even on the Fleet. On the Fleet, she wasn't a nobody, but she was the Admiral's Daughter, a symbol and an expectation more than a person. Off the Fleet, she was a quarian suit rat, a nuisance, a leech and a scavenger. But Shepard looked at Tali and saw Tali.

Of course Tali fell in love.

She never said anything, of course. Never gave a hint that when Shepard came down to the drive core to visit her and told her that she was smart and talented and more than welcome on the Normandy, that it had made her heart light. Never breathed a whisper of her attraction to the confident set of Shepard's shoulders, the square way she stood, like a bulwark against the chaos, like a sentinel against the night. Quarians had rather different regulations about fraternization than most other species—they had to, as marriages would of necessity almost always be between shipmates, and forbidding friendly relationships between superiors and their subordinates on small ships would lead to crushing isolation for the ship captains—but there were very strict rules nonetheless about romantic relationships with your direct superiors. (In her parents' marriage, her mother, as a doctor-engineer, had answered to Zaal'Koris of the Civilian Fleet, and never to her own husband.) To flirt with your superior was bad; to attempt a romantic relationship with them, worse. 

(And, yes, yes, part of it is this: she is afraid that she is betraying her people. It is a thing that everyone knows but no one is willing to quite say, that sometimes the brightest, the most talented quarians see the wider galaxy and decide that they want to stay. Quarians who never return from pilgrimage are not _entirely_ those who fail, or those who fall afoul of aliens who take advantage of them. Tali returned; Tali will always return to her people. But sometimes she fears that she has betrayed them nonetheless by leaving her heart in the hands of an alien.)

So she said nothing. And when Shepard died, she grieved, she made her silent love a funeral offering, and she tried to move on.

When Shepard returned, like a miracle, like some divine figure reborn from ashes, it was all the harder, and yet all the more important, for Tali to hide her feelings. There were greater things at stake, more important priorities than her own silly heart, pining after a woman who was an ocean and a wildfire all in one. It was fortunate, at least, that Shepard didn't know her culture enough to know when she slipped—when she said that she would gladly link suits with Shepard, were that possible—Shepard didn't know, fully, what that would mean.

And now there is Rannoch, and Shepard millions of miles away rebuilding her own home.

But when she sits on that cliff every eighth-day, her lightflyer parked nearby, watching the sunset glinting on the water and taking her mask off (her great indulgence) to breathe unfiltered air, to smell fresh water and clean dust and sun-warmed resinwood cooling in the gathering evening... she cannot help but think of Shepard, who is as bright, as brutal, as beautiful as her own desert homeworld.

* * *

They talk, of course. Shepard is good at keeping in touch.

"Things going all right?" Shepard's voice crackles across the comm. The vid-comm network is still staggering, with so many comm beacons blown out during the war, so their calls—every few weeks—are audio-only, and even there the quality is not the best. Tali isn't sure whether that makes it easier or harder, that she can't see Shepard's face but can hear her warm voice.

"As well as can be expected." Quarters are not quite as cramped in the settlement as they were on the Fleet, but still, her room is small, and so while talking she lies on her bedroll, looking up at the ceiling. (She still wears her suit here at all times—in part because her body cannot yet tolerate more than very brief exposures to the open air, in part because there is more danger in taking her mask off in the close quarters of the settlement than in the free-blowing air on the cliffs. Besides, though she has come to relish the ability to see the water and the cliffs and the sunset without her visor mediating the view, there is not much to see here besides an extruded plastic ceiling.) "The Admirals are arguing—"

"—hah, tell me something I couldn't guess—"

Tali grins, and continues, "—about whether to move the algae and yeast farms planetside, or leave them in orbit. Honestly, both sides have a point and either solution would be satisfactory, but if I have to listen to one more angry argument about yeast protein synthesis I may lose what remains of my mind."

"Hang in there," Shepard says. "I'm sure at any moment they will ask you to—"

"—blow things up?" Tali finishes, sweetly, and Shepard laughs.

"I _do_ know that you have talents beyond blowing things up, as good as you are at that," Shepard says, and Tali glows at the praise, despite herself.

"How are things on Earth?" Tali asks, letting her eyes drift shut, imagining that Shepard is not many star systems away but here, sitting across the room in that way she has, where even just in a chair with her elbows on her knees she seems to fill the entire space. The same way that a fire's heat and light occupies a greater space than the fire itself. 

"Oh, you know," Shepard says, "...bad." And then she laughs, and so Tali can laugh too. "The infrastructure's fucked to hell and back and it seems like every day we find out we've lost some cultural treasure or other to fire or flooding or whatnot because we can't get things shored up fast enough. It's a constant race against entropy." There's a little sound, a breath, and Tali can see in her mind's eye Shepard shifting, stretching her legs out in front of her the way she does, one boot crossed over the opposite ankle. "It's sort of refreshing to talk to you, you know? You're building everything fresh, from scratch, more or less. We're trying to patch things together."

"We can only start 'from scratch' because we've already lost almost all of our cultural treasures beyond saving."

"Yeah," Shepard says. "I know." There's a pause. "I wish I could come visit. I'd love to see what you're doing there."

Tali's heart flutters. To cover it, she says, "Algae farms and all?"

"Algae farms and all," Shepard says.

* * *

They move the algae farms, in the end. It wouldn't be possible without help from the geth, but—they can _get_ help from the geth, now. Which is something strange, almost a miracle in itself. It turns out that Tali's most important role on the Admiralty board now is that she is their geth liaison, which is not a position that she would have imagined for herself in any plausible universe. And yet here it is. 

(She asked, once, while discussing a construction project with a geth prime, why they liked her—why they preferred to talk to her of all the Admiralty Board, even though Zaal'Koris had been sympathetic to the geth for longer. It had thought about that a moment, headflaps moving in a silent language of thought, before it said, "Legion trusted you."

"Legion and I fought almost every moment we were together."

"Yes." Its mechanical voice was not quite Legion's—it was deeper, resonating in a much bigger platform—but close enough to be painfully familiar. "But Legion trusted you."

She'd paused, rubbing her hands together in a moment of anxiety that she could not, quite, explain. "Thank you," she finally said.)

She tours the facilities, clambers over algae tanks and stands on yeast boilers, compliments geth and quarian workers—more for being able to work together than for anything else—and feels a fool. Once she was on the front lines, making a difference herself. Now she—what, makes polite speeches?

"Welcome to peacetime," Garrus says, when he makes his monthly call. There is laughter in his voice, but not mean laughter. "Now do you see why I used to go half-crazy in C-Sec? This is the kind of bullshit you always have to deal with when you aren't actually punching Reapers in the face."

"And I'm _so_ sorry we don't have any Reapers left to punch in the face," Tali says, falling back on her back on the bed. 

"I didn't mean that," Garrus says. "Of course it's better now. But less straightforward."

"Right. Tell me about your less-straightforward tasks, now, Mister Hierarchy Hero," she says, with a roll of her eyes.

He laughs again, but obliges her, regaling her with a story that ends with him trapped in an elevator with an asari diplomat and a volus merchant prince. Tali is halfway convinced he's making it up, but enjoying the story too much to stop him. 

Once he's done, she says, "Well, at least that will never happen to me."

"How can you be so sure?"

"No elevators on Rannoch," she says, with the air of one laying down a trump card.

"Oh, just you wait. There will be, soon enough. And then you'll be stuck making conversation with a Colossus."

"Geth colossus don't have voice synthesizers." She _had_ had conversations with geth personalities that spent most of their time installed on colossus platforms—for all that it was easy to think of a colossus as an animal given its body structure and fighting style, they were as intelligent as any geth, and could be quite eloquent when they chose—but it was always over the extranet. There was admittedly something eerie about spending time with a creature that was silent save for mechanical noises, and then getting a ping on your omnitool with several lucid paragraphs... but she was getting used to it.

"Even better. Your conversation will be you saying, 'So, how's life?' and it saying 'beep boop beep.'"

"Ugh, remind me _not_ to invite you here. You'll undo months of diplomatic advances regarding the geth."

"Too late," Garrus says.

"Oh?"

"You hadn't heard yet? Admiral Koris and Captain Danna arranged some diplomatic thing a few months from now. I just submitted my acceptance. I hear Wrex is going to be there too."

" _Keelah_ ," Tali says, with feeling. "I love Wrex, but he's going to—to tell the geth that he remembers when they were farm implements, or something."

"Well, he probably does. He's about a thousand years old, I think."

" _I know_. That's the problem."

"Don't worry, I don't think he's going to insult the geth."

"I'm not sure why you think not—"

"He's going to have a few too many glasses of ryncol, then ruffle your hair and pinch your cheeks and tell everyone that he remembers when you were just a wee quarian on Pilgrimage."

"Keelah," Tali says. " _Keelah_ , you're right."

"I'd normally say that it's impossible to ruffle a quarian's hair or pinch her cheeks, but I'm confident Wrex will manage."

Tali pulls a pillow over her face and groans. "Garrus, I hate you."

"Hey, I'm not going to embarrass you in front of everyone. Probably. Why hate me?"

"Because you made me think about this and now I'll _worry_."

"Well, don't worry too much. Shepard's coming too. I'm sure she'll keep Wrex in check."

Tali feels the familiar flutter-thump in her chest, her belly. "Shepard's coming too?"

"Yeah." There is a pause, and then she can almost _feel_ Garrus leering, across millions of miles. "Looking forward to seeing her, are you?"

"Garrus."

"You aren't her crew member anymore, you know. You could say something."

" _Garrus_. No. She has work on Earth and I have work here and—and—I don't see how we could ever, possibly, make it work."

"There's no way to know unless you try. Unless you don't even want to try."

Tali sighs, loudly, dragging a hand down the faceplate of her suit. "Who ever made you an intergalactic matchmaker?"

"You're both my friends, I'd like to see you happy. Besides, you're funny when you get flustered."

"I hate you."

"Aw, you don't mean that."

"No," Tali said. "I don't. Good night, Garrus."

"It's actually midmorning, here."

She smiles, despite herself. "Good morning, Garrus," she says, and cuts off the comm.

* * *

The most precious memory Tali has of Shepard isn't their parting in London, or their reunion after. It isn't when she got drunk on stolen—no, not stolen, _repurposed_ —turian brandy and poured out all her insecurities. It isn't even when Shepard saved her father's honor and her own position on the Fleet, when she accidentally confessed her love in a way that Shepard would likely never understand.

It is this:

A quiet period, transit time from one planet to another. She'd camped out in the lounge, repairing Chatika, and Shepard arrived a little later and began fine-tuning her own drone. They didn't talk much, passing tools back and forth and offering brief moments of advice.

It was quiet. But it was familiar, comfortable—the close quarters, and yet the peaceable silence. It reminded her of the Fleet.

She couldn't remember having been so comfortable with another person her whole life.

She thinks about that a lot, that moment. Sometimes, on the cliff over the river, she closes her eyes and remembers.

* * *

Tali doesn't obsess over seeing Shepard again. She _doesn't_. She has other things to worry about, ensuring that everything is ready for the visiting delegations. She has many, many other things to worry about, besides thinking about bright eyes and a stalwart posture and a smile so warm that—

—no.

Until the day arrives, and Shepard is there, and Tali feels like an iron filing in the presence of a magnet. It takes everything she has in her not to orient to Shepard at every moment, even though as one of the Admiralty Board she has many other duties to perform, many other roles to play. She greets Garrus and Wrex with affection only somewhat modulated by the formality of the occasion; she introduces the asari dignitary to the geth in attendance, and does her best to act as a buffer between her fear and their awkwardness; she spends fifteen minutes in conversation with the elcor representative, who seems frankly surprised and honored to have been invited. ("With polite astonishment: I never expected to stand on the quarian homeworld. While attempting to hide smugness: My clan members will never get over that I was here and they were not.")

And then, finally, _finall_ y, Shepard, who—although no one quite officially acknowledges it—is the star of any room she stands in, the hero of every hour.

(Tali wonders, suddenly, watching them flock around her, what that's like. To be known as the Woman Who Saved All Galactic Life. It is hard enough for her, to be The Woman Who Helped Broker Peace With The Geth, Rael'Zorah's Daughter, The Woman Instrumental in Reclaiming the Homeworld, and that is only a tiny slice of what Shepard must deal with every hour, every minute, every second.

She is filled suddenly with a desire to give Shepard a sanctuary from that, a place away from it where she can be only herself. It is a selfish desire. But it is true.)

"Tali," Shepard says, seeing her; and Shepard lights up, a light that glows in her eyes and in her skin and in all of her. Tali's heart leaps and her lungs contract and all of her leans into the embrace. "I was wondering where they were hiding you."

"Diplomatic duties," Tali says, with a sigh, and Shepard grins.

"I know the feeling. Look, I'm going to be swarmed for the next couple of hours, but do you think we could talk—after? Somewhere private?''

The thunder in Tali's chest intensifies, becomes a storm, all lightning and drumbeats and the promise of rain. "Yes," she says, "I'd like that."

* * *

It is afterwards, after the various diplomatic niceties, after the dinner, after many speeches, that they finally find each other. Tali guides Shepard away from the settlement, but just a little way. The valley in which they settled has a river running through it: not quite as pretty a river as the one where Shepard killed the Reaper, but wider and softer, and there are trees and bushes along its banks. Tali knows their names only hesitantly, from books. Genuflectiontrees bow over the water, dragging long leaves on the rippling surface. Jewelflowers bloom in the marshy earth. Tarandi stretch for the sky, as rigidly upright as a by-the-books turian. (She made that joke to Garrus earlier, who laughed and said that he saw the similarity with Executor Pallin.) 

"It's good to see you," Shepard says, as they walk along. "It's been too long."

"I know you get to see Garrus and Wrex and Liara more often," Tali says. "But my duties here—"

"I wasn't criticizing," Shepard says. 

Tali wrings her hands. "I know," she says. "But—I miss—"

"I miss you too," Shepard says. She pauses, there, by the river, where the danari vines crush underfoot and lightbugs swirl in the dim. "Tali, I missed you more than I thought I would. I hope you don't take that the wrong way."

"No," Tali says, stumbling now, as she still does when she's nervous, over her tongue, her words: "no, no, of course—no. I. I mean, I missed you too, a lot. I wish we could talk more, but I'm so busy, and the power to send comm signals is precious—"

"I told you, you don't need to apologize," Shepard says.

"No, I do. Because I feel terrible that I cannot make more time for someone I love—"

There is a silence, broken only by nightbirds calling in the distance.

(She didn't mean to say 'love.' She meant to say 'miss.' Someone I miss. Surely. Surely that is what she meant—

—except that Tali knows that what she says when she is stumbling for words is always the truest, and she suspects Shepard knows too.)

"What?" Shepard says, eventually.

Tali's hands come up, over her faceplate. _Keelah_ , she has always been one to babble but this—"Pretend I didn't say anything."

"No," Shepard says. "I'd... rather not. What did you say? Again? Please." And when Tali hesitates, she adds, "I'm not trying to embarrass you."

"I love you," Tali says, hand still over her face. "I _do_. I have for years. But I didn't mean to _tell_ you. I know you need to be on Earth and I need to be here, and—and I don't even know if you'd be interested, with an alien, and—"

"Tali," Shepard says. Her hands close around Tali's wrists, tug her hands down. "I love you too."

"—or with me, I mean, you've never—" Tali says, and then raises her eyes to meet Shepard's. Her voice is weak. "...what?"

"I love you too," Shepard says, and her voice is all warmth, the warmest thing in the world, the sun rising over the valley. "Didn't you know?"

"No," Tali says, a whisper from breathless lungs.

And Shepard smiles, that smile that she has that could conquer nations, that could win anyone over to her cause. Her fingers tighten around Tali's. She leans forward to kiss her, not on the faceplate where it would leave a mark but just above it, on the rim. "Not at first, when you were still half a child, but later, yes. When I found you again on the second Normandy, then, I knew," she says. "Here I thought I was being so ridiculously obvious about it."

"Not as far as I could tell," Tali says, faintly, her fingers tightening on Shepard's. "I thought it must have been obvious that I was mooning after you, too."

"I wasn't letting myself even look for signs of that," Shepard says. "I couldn't have done anything about it then anyway. And I didn't want to torment myself with wishful thinking." She pauses, looking up, through the arched branches of the genuflectiontrees to the stars above. "It's still true that I'm needed on Earth and you're needed here. But I'll be here for week. Maybe... we can figure something out?"

"We always have been good at solving difficult problems," Tali says, and laughs.

* * *

Every six-day Tali takes a lightflyer out to the cliffs and thinks of Rannoch, and her future, and of Shepard.

This time she brings Shepard with her.

"I didn't know you could pilot," Shepard says as the lightflyer sails above the desert, toward the glittering ribbon of the river.

"Not well," Tali says, hand light on the controls. "Fortunately, this is an easy flight, and the weather is nearly always calm."

She sets down the flyer in the spot that, someday, will be her home. (Perhaps a home for two. Even if Shepard cannot live here all the time, Tali cherishes the hope that this will at least be a place she can come back to.) The air is dry, the sun low, just as it was before. Birds, startled by the landing lightflyer, rise from their nesting spots in the Reaper shell.

"Like old times, huh?" Shepard says, settling an arm around Tali's waist. It is not a touch she is accustomed to yet; it still sends a thrill down her spine as she leans into Shepard's warm presence.

"But no Reapers. No war. And... no Legion." Tali puts her hand over Shepard's where it sits at her hip, squeezing her fingers. "I miss him sometimes. I didn't think I would."

"It's still beautiful," Shepard says. She isn't looking at the river.

This was why Tali brought her here, and though she never said it in as many words, they both knew it. She takes a breath, a little hesitant, a little unsure, and reaches up to unlatch the seals on her mask.

Shepard has seen her face before. At least Tali does not need to worry that she will be shocked and horrified by a quarian's appearance. (Shepard is the only person besides the Fleet doctors who has seen her bare face.) But she's still nervous, and Shepard stops her with a hand on her wrist. "You don't have to, you know."

Tali gives a shaky laugh. "Shepard, you're leaving soon. I'm not letting you get away without kissing you."

The smell of the unfiltered air on this cliffside is familiar to her, now. The sun-warmed scent of the vines, the clean earth smell of stone and soil, the crisp aroma of water far below. But it's so different, too. Shepard touches her cheek with gentle fingers, slides fingertips over Tali's hair. "You really are lovely," she says.

"Thank you," Tali says, and then leans forward to kiss her.

It's awkward, her first kiss, and part of her is still afraid of the risk despite herself. Her mouth slips over Shepard's, not unsure but hesitant. But then Shepard catches the back of her head and guides her, warm and warm and warm, and Tali's heart pounds and she realizes that she has made fists in Shepard's jacket to pull her closer, closer. Shepard is all heat and light, a fire under her hands.

When Tali finally has to pull away, trembling and breathless as if she'd run here from the city instead of taking the flyer, Shepard doesn't go far. She tilts her head until their foreheads touch. On the horizon, the sun goes down, and in the river, the world retakes the Reaper, and here, Tali holds to Shepard and doesn't let go.

She thinks, _Yes_.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "Beautiful Day" by U2.


End file.
